A Feast for a Ranger

 

Y'all know that I also an obscure and little-read author, right?  This short story is pretty clean and sells for 99 cents.  Go check it out!

Eroticism of the Rope; or, 50 Shades of Cowpokes

I was reading through my semi-completed novel today and two things struck me.  First, it’s not nearly as bad as I remember.  There are some really good bits in there.  I told Mrs. Slap today that between the campfire sex scene and the gunfight at the dam I wasn’t sure which was my favorite chapter.  On the same note I’m struggling to figure out what publisher would pick it up.  It really is cowpoke on cowpoke, which fits a lot of the stuff published by women’s erotica e-publishers, but it’s got a couple of gunfights and a scene that is a little more twisted than the typical erotic romance publishers put out.  Maybe a publisher for gay men?  Very limiting market, though.  If there is still a market for Laurel K Hamilton, whose books have descended to wall to wall fucking and gore, then there may be a place for me.

The other thing that struck me was one exchange between the two main characters after one of the fights:

“May I ask why, if you carry a pistol on your belt and a Winchester in a saddle sheath, did you go at Big Mo with a lasso?”

“Not really sure,” Johnny said, scratching his head.  “It’s a pretty rare occasion that I actually ever draw a gun, but I use the lasso all the time.  Just was natural, I reckon.  Good thing, too.  I don’t want any more blood than necessary between our brands.”

“So you are good with a rope, too, Sir Cowboy?” said Antonio, moving his eyes across Johnny’s form.  “My imagination runs wild.”

“Ease up, there, buckaroo.  We’ve got miles to go and a judge to meet.”

I had a group of friends in college that were largely obsessed with bondage, so much so that when I got out of college the idea that people didn’t just sit around and discuss the advantages of silk scarves vs nylon cord or the best time to take off the blindfold was kind of weird.  None of them could afford all the crazy gear, but one dorm mate made special trips to the local K-Mart with his girlfriend to see which cutting boards made the best paddles.  Everyone I knew read Anne Rice’s The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty. 

The world of BDSM, with all of its whips, ropes, and leather chaps, looks surprisingly like a western.  For the most part you just have to trade the shiny black leather for worn brown, swap the zipper mask for a cowboy hat, and move the scene from the abandoned Berlin factory to a Colorado ghost town. 

A couple of years ago an adult film studio made a film from Zane Grey’s To The Last Man.  The studio, Raging Stallion (how awesome is that name?), specializes in exceptionally manly men with muscles and beards doing exceptionally manly things with other exceptionally manly men.  Alas, I have not seen this film, but I have read about a controversial scene where a cowboy is tied up and sexually assaulted by two gunhands riding for another brand.  There are some interesting chat board discussions that focus just one this scene; some think it is disgusting, but just as many think it’s the hottest scene in the movie.

Despite their occasional similarities, this gets to the difference between traditional BDSM literature and what you find in Westerns.  BDSM is a safe place in fiction.  We can feel the anxiety of the bottom while knowing that, ultimately, they will come away relatively unscathed.  Behind every red bottom spanking there is an open palm of love, so they say.  In Western fiction, the world is harsher, without guarantees of safety. 

Take Lonesome Dove, for example.  Early on Lorena, the town prostitute / main love interest for several characters, is kidnapped by an Indian outlaw, Blue Duck.  Sounds like the start of some kind of erotic bondage romance?  Anyone familiar with Lonesome Dove knows that part of the story is neither romantic nor erotic.

Not fun

 

Fun

With its whips, chaps, ropes, and masks, there’s a lot of room for kink in westerns.  Just don’t always expect that warm, fuzzy, “he tied me up because he loves me” feeling.

 

(Note about the title- in my 20’s I read all of the classics of erotic bondage- Story of O, 9 ½ Weeks, Claiming of Sleeping Beauty, etc.  By the time the 50 Shades phenomena hit I’d had my fill.  50 Shades of Yoga, though, now that’s fun.)

Cowboys; or, What I Learned About Testicles While Researching a Novel

Just over a year ago I decided that I would address a long standing item on my bucket list and start writing a short novel.  The novel would be a western, of course, and I decided that it should have all of the things that I like to read in westerns- vast landscapes, a love of the wild, eroticism, and occasional gunplay.  A few different plotlines came and went, and eventually I settled on a story of small scale range war and two cowboys, once pards, now foes, who fought that war.  Details came together, but one problem emerged when I just couldn’t wrap my head around writing a female character. What the heck, I know that there is a dearth of good female characters out there, but I would go about solving that problem on my second novel- I just had to write one for now.  So there’s the characters, the conflict, the plot, the gunfight, the sex… ah, now we get to the problem with this novel.

I tend not to write things in order, so I just hopped around the outline filling in pieces.  It hummed along pretty well at first, drawing on memory, personal experience, and other western books and movies.  A hike through Oak Creek Canyon stood in for one location, a shootout from Encore Westerns filled in the gunfight in one chapter, and so forth.  I kept skipping the sex scenes, though, because I couldn’t quite wrap my head around how they would work.  There were clear points in the story where the sex scenes should go.  There was a tense almost kiss in the early pages that was easy to write.  I’ve kissed before, and lips are lips.  I took almost all of it from an odd encounter with a friend who may in retrospect not be so lesbian, at least not after a half dozen cocktails.  But the sex?

It doesn’t take too much imagination to figure out what dudes do with other dudes.  Tab A, slot B, etc, etc.  Easy enough to find out what it looks like in the vast pornographic engine of the internet.  I could probably write bouncing genitalia, but what I really want to write is characters and how they feel.  This is, alas, a rare problem that is not solved by internet porn.  There was always the option of asking gay friends, but I couldn’t think of anyone I knew well enough to ask real details from.  There is a big difference between having someone over for dinner and asking that someone “so what do you think about while you do it with another dude?”  Finally, I decided to go to the source, as it were, and bought a book of erotic short stories about gay cowboys entitled, appropriately enough, Cowboys: Gay Erotic Tales. 

I learned two important lessons from reading these stories that I will take with me in my writing.  First, gay men (or the straight women that read gay porn) have a much different view of genitalia than I do.  I figured that there would be some exaggerated descriptions of extraordinary phalluses, and there were a few.  What I was not prepared for was the focus on testicles.  At least once in each story there was a loving description of a cowpoke’s balls: hairy or smooth, high & tight or low & wrinkly, hefty, large, or epic in scope.  There are apparently no small testicles in the land of gay cowboys.  The bigger, the better; I had no idea.

The second lesson that I learned was that even the hack writers that contribute short stories to erotica anthologies are better writers than me.  Really, these things are almost all well written considering that they are essentially porn.  It is amazing the kind of character development that you can spin out in a dozen pages, particularly when half those pages are devoted to fucking.

While I learned a few bedroom (or haystack) gymnastics and some alternate views on genitalia, what I really got out of reading Cowboys: Gay Erotic Tales was the notion that short erotic fiction is still fiction, and you can leave the pages feeling like you’ve been inside the characters, so to speak, even if you did leave those pages a bit sticky.